The Crazy Fried Food You Shouldn't Ignore This Summer

This guy sells 52,000 of these a week. One bite, and you'll wonder why it took you so long to try it.

It's easy to go deep-fried blind at the fair—and not just in a literal sense from all of the sugar and grease. When every stand touts half a dozen (or more) batter-dipped treats, it can be hard to figure out which ones are worth the minutes of your life.

Brian "the Deep-Fry Guy" Shenkman knows your struggle all too well. In fact, he's part of the reason why you can't make up your mind—he sells dozens of deep-fried treats. At eight fairs nationwide, people head to his stand to dare their friends to try fried cream-cheese larvets—yup, crispy larvae rolled in cream cheese balls—or grab a deep-fried Milky Way, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or the perennial favorite, deep-fried Oreos.

Kirsten Braun

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As epic as the Oreos are—they basically turn into a molten, cookies-and-creme-flavored dough in the center of a pancake-like fried ball—Shenkman says people rank it second-best once they try his Deep-Fried Buckeyes. They just have to be sold on what a Buckeye is first.

"We've started putting up signs that explain that it's basically a peanut butter dough ball dipped in chocolate, then batter-dipped and fried, because the name alone freaked people out," he said, as he pulled out five Oreos and five Buckeyes to treat us to a side-by-side taste test.

"When I came up with the idea, I called up the Ohio State Fair and asked if I could do it. I didn't hear back, so I thought they didn't take me seriously, and I forgot about it," Shenkman explained while he dipped each Buckeye in a funnel-cake-like batter.

Ferny Chung

About a week before the fair opened, officials came calling: Word had spread about the deep-fried Buckeyes, and they couldn't wait for Shenkman to debut them. The only problem? Since he hadn't heard back, he hadn't tried making them yet.

"The first tests were crazy. When I dipped the Buckeyes into the fryer, some were falling apart, some exploded," he said. "You want them to float, like these are."

Ferny Chung

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He came up with a successful formula just in time for the Ohio State Fair nine years ago—and he's been the fair's exclusive Deep-Fried Buckeye vendor ever since, with five stands spread out across its grounds to keep up with demand.

Once the battered Buckeyes and Oreos have become lightly golden, Shenkman pulls them from the fryer and dusts them with a liberal coating of powdered sugar.

Ferny Chung

Shenkman tries to introduce something new every year, though he says he'll probably slow down now that his other stand at the fair—the Bulk Candy Store, which sells 4,000 kinds of niche, hard-to-find sweets, like Purple Violets and caramel-cream Bullseyes—has become his main business.

"I bring 60,000 pounds of candy to each fair," he says. Many of the candies are also batter-dipped and deep-fried to see if they're worthy of being added to his menu. Many have failed—he shook his head as he recalls the neon gummy worms, which essentially dissolved when cooked.

"In the off-season, I set up a row of deep fryers and instituted 'Fry-Days,' where we went to the supermarket and grabbed anything we could find and tried deep-frying it," he said. The cream-cheese larvets were a more recent addition, though they weren't so much a Fry-Day Friday experiment as they were a challenge from Food Network's Carnival Eats to create something truly eye-catching.

"They definitely get people's attention," Shenkman said.

Turning back to the fried Buckeyes and Oreos, Shenkman added one final—yet crucial—touch: A drizzle of Hershey's chocolate sauce on top of each.

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Ferny Chung

As much as we love all things Oreo (and these pillowy bombs of gooey Oreo deliciousness took our obsession to the next level), we had to agree: The Buckeyes were one part cookie dough, one part melted Reese's Cup, one part gift from above.

"You see?" he asked, when I reached for a second Buckeye—the only confirmation he needed to know that the peanut-butter-chocolate-orb had stolen my heart. His voice suddenly dropped to a conspiratorial whisper: "One person who tried it said it was better than sex."